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We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.
- Pericles funeral oration, Athens, 431 BCE The 17th Topshee Conference, sponsored by the Extension Department of St Francis Xavier University, convened over the weekend of May 25-26, 2002 on the theme of "reclaiming democracy". It attracted about 300 participants from trade unions and active community organisations across the Atlantic provinces.
As a social and political activist in this region for the last thirty years, I had almost attended the Topshee on perhaps half-a-dozen occasions. This time -- essentially, in order to enable a long-time acquaintance and frequent Topshee-goer to attend, in spite of formidable physical handicaps, and incidentally also to promote "shunpiking" discovery magazine -- I actually, finally, got there.
As anticipated, I re-encountered people I had not seen in years, and made new friends.
The opening session was a keynote speech by Stephen Lewis, a former Ontario politician now in diplomatic service at the United Nations in New York. During the closing 2-1/2-hour plenary town hall on Sunday morning, a wide range of views were aired, discussing many themes from his keynote speech.
But the speech itself was being lauded uncritically, without further analysis. I had not anticipated addressing a plenary session. But simmering beneath the surface was the reaction many delegates had to Lewis's dismissal of a question about Canada-US relations. As one delegate after another avoided any reference to this egregious exchange a moment shocking enough that people were talking about it throughout the rest of the conference the cup was filled to overflowing and I felt compelled to "share", as they say...
What follows incorporates some elaboration on remarks that were delivered extemporaneously, although specific references to the keynote speakers remarks have been reproduced without elaboration.
For various reasons, the keynote speech is not being published in the Conference proceedings and has appeared nowhere else to date. Meanwhile, the need to deconstruct and settle accounts with its principal assumptions, which mystify the essence of popular participation in social, political and economic struggles and thereby reduce the content of democracy merely to high-sounding phrases, has become more urgent.
In the eventful year that has passed since this conference, an unprecedented mass mobilization unfolded around the globe: from November 2002 through March 2003, anywhere from 9 million people in about 400 cities to more than 15 million in more than 800 cities came out during designated 24-hour periods onto the streets in massive demonstrations to "reclaim democracy", and more, against the plans of the U.S. for unilateral aggression in Iraq.
After the scheme to sell the United Nations Security Council on the bogus claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and would need to be "disarmed by the international community" fell apart, a combined US-British force of about 175,000 troops invaded Iraq after March 19, 2003, toppling Saddam Hussein. Eschewing any official act of surrender, the regime abandoned the field of military and political struggle as U.S. troops entered Baghdad a month later. Without waiting to learn whether the Ba'ath-ists would attempt to reorganize either collaboration with, or resistance to, the conquerors, people across Iraq launched their own resistance to the ensuing military occupation.
Since Bush declared "victory" on May 1, 2003, not a day has gone by that the forces of resistance have not killed or wounded members of the occupying forces.
Meanwhile, also within the past year, "shunpiking" discovery magazine, to which I alluded above and which is mentioned again below, published its "Dossier on Palestine". Released at the end of October 2002, this was a 96-page magazine-formatted book on the situation in Palestine at the time of "Operation Defensive Shield", a two-month full-scale pre-emptive invasion-strike by the Israeli armed forces, mainly in the West Bank, directed principally against "centres of resistance" to Israel's 35-years-long occupation.
The Dossier was warmly welcomed and embraced across wide sections of the anti-war movement building against American schemes in the Middle East, by progressive sections of Jewish public opinion thoroughly disgusted and outraged with Israel's behaviour and efforts by its apologists to stereotype opponents as "anti-Semitic", and by Islamic groups and individuals with whom the Dossier's clearcut defence of the right to conscience against those whipping up "post-9/11" racist and chauvinist hysteria against Islamic belief and believers, resonated passionately.
This positive response caught the Zionist establishment, bereft of their usual phalanx of "liberal" allies, flat-footed and unable to respond other than to pretend the Dossier didn't exist. This *entire* motion -- the research, writing, editing, publication, distribution, sale and widespread discussion of the Dossier -- drew a "line in the sand" whose significance was 180-degrees opposite what U.S. president George Bush the First had intended when he took credit for a similar "line" at the time of the First Gulf War back in 1990-91. The Dossier, including everything that went into its production, drew a line between those who were actually out to reclaim democracy by concrete deeds and those who were out to smash and exterminate it by terrorist deeds -- "cowards and heroes face to face", as one Dossier contributor would write.
The two most burning, hottest-button aspects of democratic activism within the contemporary scene - namely, the role of the monopoly media in marginalising people's participation in social-political life, and the role of the world imperialist system led by U.S. imperialism in negating entire nations and countries - were the two aspects that Lewis's keynote speech at the Topshee had treated in the most patronising terms. They were the two issues which cried out for clarification by the time the "town hall" session convened.
Following several others interventions on democracy, media and the so-called alternate press, I began by pointing out that I had to begin by seeking to clarify a point by the moderator about the death of the so-called "alternate press". While the specific examples she cited of terminal and-or near-death experiences among magazines and journals were not incorrect, the conclusion that the alternate press was "dying" needed to be further explored: I.
The modern state is inconceivable without mass media. Media emerged as a social power as one of the outcomes of the struggle to replace a system based on feudal privileges with another system purporting to be democratic. Many a modern state touts the idea that they are more or less democratic in form. Most are anything but democratic in practice.
The same media that identify democracy with these forms (for example, saying George W Bush was elected President), while keeping silent about their content (...elected by the Supreme Court, 5-4, after the regular electoral process had become discredited and sidelined in utter confusion and disarray), are the very media which have been experiencing the most serious credibility crisis. They are increasingly rejected by wide sections of the public.
This has reached the point where the provision of other media as a so-called alternative has been able to proliferate as an industry in its own right for the last 20 years.
The crucial point of which quite a few people seem to have lost sight is that very, very few of these alternative media have found ways (or interested themselves in finding ways) to oppose the decay of democracy in practice. Quite a few are utterly self-absorbed with questions of lifestyle. They couldnt care less about heavy matters such as how democratic any cell of the political, economic or cultural life of society actually is.
I'm not speaking to toot anyone's horn. But there is a profound issue of principle to bring out. Consider the situation of "shunpiking" discovery magazine. It has embarked on its seventh year still committed to the program it elaborated from the outset: to discover the physical and social-political environment of Nova Scotians. This is fundamentally a democratic mission. It is not the pursuit of the interest of any one social class or bloc of classes. As such, it is, of necessity, *not* the vehicle of any particular ideological standpoint or set of positions.
Others who committed themselves ideologically to projects that subsequently ran their course and failed to solve the problems of renewal now find themselves on life-support or past that point. But "shunpiking" seems to have dodged that bullet. How? Why?
"Shunpiking" from the beginning eschewed holding a brief for or against any particular ideological position. This is something entirely separate and distinguishable from the question of whether the writers and editors have views or express definite opinions. While some ideologues or academics may have a problem with the magazines eclecticism, its readers spanning an incredibly broad range of the climate of opinion in the province are not at all confused on this point.
No one has any doubt about where the magazine can be found in the political spectrum. This or that ideological position is not the issue. Media that survive as a force among the people come out of the real needs of that social base and serve that base; otherwise they wither. Even the most lavishly-subsidised commercial media cannot survive public indifference or rejection indefinitely. We can consider "shunpiking" an example of a modern democratic medium precisely in this sense: that it meets such a need. At the very least, it is seen to be striving to meet it. It continues to garner or maintain support partly and simply for making the effort and persisting on such a path.
The point is: there is territory, there is democratic space, available to be reclaimed. Others have stressed the negative role played by establishment media, especially the distortion and suppression of popular participation as a method for tackling any important public policy question. But does it follow that democratic space has been eliminated, or that its come down to some handful of isolated saintly individuals to save the rest of us? No: the central issue is that media are an indispensable organic component of any genuinely democratic process. Their job is faithfully to record and reflect back to the collective the various preoccupations and concerns as they emerge.
This makes democracy en masse possible, beyond the level of the Athenian city-state and the special and transitory conditions of direct democracy. Various media organs may give birth, flourish and pass away. But media-as-such continue as long as there are collectives with issues to sort out and decisions to reach. The issue is in fact not what kind of media? but rather: what kind of collectives?
II.
Neither whether media meet the contemporary challenges to democracy, nor yet how they meet these challenges, is answered simply by hoisting the alternative banner. There is a particular matter of the content of democracy in the current conditions which establishment media have been covering up, and others have also tiptoed around. I feel compelled to raise it mainly because yesterday morning's opening address was supposed to provide the keynote for our subsequent deliberations, but little or nothing was said about the content of democracy there.
A great deal was said about democracy as a mechanism for enabling people to participate in making decisions affecting life, and there was a lot of enthusiasm expressed this morning for the idea that, if it were not to degenerate into a source of demobilising disillusionment about the prospects for effecting social change, political democracy needed to be supplemented by social and economic democracy. But the speech never spelled out any of the conditions under which a political system could either be synchronised with, or stimulate a flowering of, greater democracy either in community projects or in the workplace. It was said that this system has become dysfunctional and unrepresentative, to the extent that people have been voting for LePen in France or the Canadian Alliance as much to administer shock therapy to the system as for any positive policy reasons. But it sounded like the people were to blame. Is this a credible position to put forward in the 21st century?
Something was missing but what? We heard everything about the tremendous challenges confronting the world's people as a result of the HIV-AIDS pandemic ravaging the African continent, but about the role and responsibility of the government of the United States (which withheld dues and other support payments throughout almost all of the Reagan, Bush Sr and Carter administrations) in starving the UN of sufficient resources for its work in the first place not a word... Here lay the first clue.
It was emphasised how preoccupations with neoliberal globalisation offered the younger generation little or no future and greatly complicated the search for, or implementation of, democratically-based solutions to an entire series of major problems plaguing entire peoples and continents. But in response to the earnest query of one of our conference delegates as to what Canadians could do about the US many in this room seemed shocked at the keynote speaker's rhetorically flippant dismissal:
"Are you on drugs?"
It became increasingly clear through this weekend that his assertion that Canada as a country or Canadians as a people were or remain comfortable with how the Bush administration is handling the international situation and the issue of terrorist threats could not be allowed to go unremarked.
If this were true, then how and why has reclaiming democracy become an issue?
Before the 1990s there were issues fought out around broadening democratic access to and exercise of rights. Then came the anti-social offensive. Gains that the working people had struggled for decades to establish were stripped away under various pretexts. Concerns about how to reclaim democracy resurfaced. Meanwhile there arose the anti-globalisation wave. Questions forget about reclaiming of how to claim democracy in the first place came to the fore.
Behind every one of these shifts within our Canadian scene, something has remained constant: the drive by corporate wealth and governments acting in their stead to integrate ever more closely with the USA politically and economically. There remains an obscene readiness to tear social safety nets asunder and cancel public space in the mad scramble for ever greater opportunities of profit-making in the private sector. So, behind the decay of formal political democracy is the decay of the public sector and behind that stands nothing but the naked ambitions of pro-US and US-directed corporate power.
Democracy has become an issue for billions of people on this planet in a particular way mainly as a consequence of America's behaviour as an empire since the disappearance of the Soviet bloc. This is the scenario of America as the sole superpower. But here there is also a tremendous blind spot. The USA is also and especially increasingly concerned about avoiding becoming the last superpower. It seeks to ensure its immortality. Could this not explain why it is actively interfering in everyone else's present, striving to detect, curtail and extirpate anything it deems a threat to this aim?
The content of the question of democracy at this time boils down to this: what is to be done about U.S. imperialism?
III.
The Empire has become seized with a profound crisis of justification. This has unsettled the media (and possibly even our keynote speaker). George W Bush says he only wants to stop terrorism. But in fact the USA believes nothing is safe and secure unless it has been placed under the clear and undisputed control of their corporate, military or political arms. This is not merely business as usual on the part of a Great Power that has become accustomed to having its way. That is the crisis that now has the USA in its grip. In the wake of the travesty of the November 2000 election, the question of political democracy is more sensitive than ever.
Canadians have been compelled to live in intimate intercourse with the American empire for well, forever. It has been so long, and become so familiar, that some can sometimes fail to detect significance in certain changes in the rumblings erupting these days from the belly of the beast. Personally, I have never seen a more dangerous government holding office in that country, with such a weak to nonexistent mandate from the electorate, determined to impose unilaterally such a breadth of changes on the rest of the world. I am certain others also sense this judging from the conversations I have been part of among delegates to this conference.
But this is precisely what the media seem to have filtered out: that is the astonishing thing. Our keynote speaker didn't see fit to single this factor out, let alone comment on its significance.
How have we Canadians survived as a people and as a country? In my opinion, you cannot be Canadian without being a little anti-American. Being Canadian has always been a profoundly un-American activity.
Our destiny at this moment would seem to be that of the fish-bone in the gullet of the American eagle. If the fish-bone doesn't move, you can ignore it. But if it shifts you can end up screaming and choking. The potentially lethal consequences of swallowing it whole foreclose that option. Above all, however, the eagle cannot play nice with the fish-bone, so it is the acme of absurdity for the fish-bone to expect gratitude from the eagle. A situation at the crisis-point is a situation demanding resolution, one way or another: neither the eagle nor the fish-bone can remain indifferent.
In a previous generation, the attitude to the US as an empire seemed to be a preoccupation mainly and sometimes only of the political Left. But in the present circumstances, it has increasingly become a touchstone of democratic organising and activism at every level and across the spectrum.
The welcoming committee preparing for the G7 ministers' meeting in Halifax on June 1415 is typical. Many of its activists are ascribing credit for such progress to the growth of consciousness from below, but there is more here than meets the eye. Something needs to be said about what has made such an advance possible at this time, and why the media have made such a to-do about this development on the one hand while missing no opportunity to hurl mud at it on the other.
There has indeed been growth of consciousness from below. But instead of explicitly acknowledging this, the media have stressed how limited its spread remains to date. And, while belittling the quantity, they have not forgotten to slander its quality: stressing the anarchist element above all, and even that in a highly distorted way.
This media onslaught has been targeting the anti-globalisation movement especially since September 11. This is part of reasserting the eternal invulnerability of the status-quo to any demands for change either from below or from the margins, or from otherwise outside the ranks of its chartered supporters. But despite this barrage, the fact remains that nothing about the forms of this democracy, or about how these forms might be improved, can be discussed seriously today in Canada without asserting and affirming their fundamentally anti-imperialist content. This has become the single most outstanding quality common to practically any and every form of democratic expression at this time.
I was reminded of this when I heard that awful phrase the stakeholders of democracy trotted out a few times yesterday and today. Apart from the doubtful equating of ordinary people to corporate shareholders, it trips off the tongue so easily; it seems so... axiomatic. It brooks no critical questioning; no further explanations, no skepticism... But as witness to a wide range of the content of contemporary democratic forms of struggle, I have some recent examples involving the stakeholder shibboleth which to me seem instructive.
Some weeks ago, there was this cartoon submitted for publication by an 11yearold girl. She was very exercised about how the ecology and environment are being wrecked by corporate predators, by government doing nothing or actively abetting polluters, by the hypocrisy of politicians saying one thing but doing the opposite, etc.
She drew a scene of what looked like some occult seance. In the centre was a coffin labelled Democracy. Inside it was lying very still some figure of which only the telltale fangs were visible. Gathered round the coffin were various hooded participants.
One held up an enormous wooden stick, pointed at the end, and labelled election campaign donations. Another held up a similar object labelled tax write-offs for job creation. A third held up yet another, brandishing a slogan about tradable pollution credits, followed by a fourth, fifth etc. The entire tableau was labelled what else? the Stakeholders of Democracy.
Such is the generation nipping at our heels (or at the heels of our children). It will not tolerate any more shilly-shallying about what needs to be done. Think for a moment about what this reveals: the content of our political democracy has become such a sham that it can no longer even take in a reasonably conscientious and presumably innocent 11-year-old girl!
It is not just the self-interested striving for positions (as depicted by the various stakeholders) which could account for such a development of consciousness. It owes at least as much again to the utterly corrosive consequences of foreign domination of the commanding heights of the political and economic order in Canada especially by, and in the interests of, the United States operating as a global empire.
Another cartoon in a recent email tackled the same theme from another direction. This came from an adult with some activist experience under his belt. It manifested another level of education about certain economic realities.
His tableau depicted a sumptuous dining service. Demonstrating in vast and militant numbers outside the window of a restaurant called Chez Democracy is an enormous stream of ordinary humanity. Inside, some classically top-hatted gentlemen in formal evening dress have just sat down to a meal. On their plates are enormous slabs of marbled beef, shaped like continents and well-known large countries, labelled Canada, India, Africa, Australia and so forth. The overall tableau was entitled: Steakholders of Democracy that's steak holders, of course.
Addressing the situation in the economic base, rather than the polity, this was saying the same thing as our 11yearold: that the course which the peoples would otherwise select for themselves has been perverted and disrupted on the world scale by the self-interested and monopolising pursuits of a tiny handful of globe-girdling corporate and financial powers. It openly indicted imperialism.
For Canadians from every walk of life, different levels of social activism or political consciousness, the American empire is the issue. Continuing to lick its boots is no longer accepted as either a natural or automatic choice.
IV.
This empire has its local and international colonial administrators and other helpers in many countries beyond the USA itself including some Canadians who for whatever reason prefer the status quo under the Pox Americana pox with an o, not an a even as it runs increasingly contrary to the interests of this nation. Doubtless among that crowd, democracy has long since been reduced to a phrase.
Even as these elements ignore, or heap contempt on, those who are active and organising collectives to affirm rights and take stands on important public questions, they are unable completely to conceal their own guilty conscience and discomfort over being in the same corner or is it a closet? with the Americans. How many times have we seen the Chretien government portrayed as trying to make the best of bad situation, of making limited concessions to the Americans in order to retain control of whatevers left?
Honest and consistent democratic mobilisation is the sure path to unmasking both the latent apologists for The Empire, as well as its blatant defenders. Is unmasking a good thing? For Canadians striving to ensure that we actually solve our problems, with maximum participation from below, such unmasking cannot be a bad thing; I would argue that it is essential.
Afghanistan and bordering areas of central Asia are now theaters of war. Initially many seemed to accept the story that this was mainly retaliation for Sept 11. Meanwhile, a few pointed out the role being played well before Sept 11 by competing strivings to dominate, to redivide what has already been divided, among various powers and corporate interests. The subsequent development and dynamics of strategy and tactics deployed there fully confirmed this, exposing the shallowness of the retaliation thesis but the media have kept both lines in circulation. On the one hand, since these imperial preoccupations portend all sorts of things, open and hidden, for war and peace, we are now supposed to accept such duplicity as normal and necessary. On the other hand, the authors of and apologists for the various scenarios that have been launched can no more control any of them than you or I can push toothpaste back into the tube. What we have here is more and more military toothpaste for social decay, coupled with less and less accountability. The governments assumption of impunity for invasions of civil liberty previously thought to lie beyond the pale has further compounded problems in daily life, as the war becomes an excuse to criminalise all forms of dissent, including arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention of persons of Arab origin or family connections back to the Middle East. (In the U.S. as of April 30, some 1,200 such cases had been acknowledged. None have been acknowledged within Canada, although U.S. authorities have been detaining Canadian citizens of suspicious national origin legally resident in the U.S. without a peep from Ottawa.-Ed. note).
Where do we Canadians go from here? What of the future we wish to bequeath our children and grandchildren? The answers are intimately bound up with the stand we take regarding that empire. As the essential content of democratic struggle for the present and foreseeable future, those answers are also inseparable from the forms of democratic participation that develop, in which there will be a settling of accounts.
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